One Last Thing…I Have Visions

What makes a director “visionary”? Has anyone else noticed that any movie that sort-of rides on the thin line of artsy and mainstream will try balls out to get people into theaters by pumping up the name of the director? So what happens when the director isn’t a household name? They call him “visionary”.

The trend seemed to take off during the failed ad campaign for Watchmen. The execs at WB decided that riding on the fact that it’s based on one of the most renowned graphic novels of all time was not good enough to fill up theaters (and in hindsight, it wasn’t). So they start plastering the director’s presence on all of the ads. Soon, everyone got a face full of “from the visionary director of 300”, and it may or may not have been a deciding factor in the minds of potential audiences. Well, the ads still didn’t work, Watchmen was still a flop, but now every film that is close to failing financially will call their director a visionary.

Exhibit A: 9

borrowed from the front page of chud.com

9 is the type of movie that I couldn’t get a hard on for if I had popped 3 Cialis and had a bucket of cheese fries in my hands. There is nothing about this movie that excites me. However, people are excited when they hear the word Tim Burton. So they slap his name on and throw throw that in every ad. But that’s not good enough. Not only does this film appeal to the Burton crowd, but it could also be an action movie. Hey remember that guy that directed Wanted? Yeah lets make him an executive producer. But wait, his name isn’t that recognizable. So let’s just mention that he’s the director of Wanted, duh! But wait, remember back in March when WB made a big push on the Watchmen director? Lets do that. So now we have:

Yep, he’s a visionary alright. I’m very surprised that they didn’t say “From the visionary director of Hangnail“. Because that movie was a fucking classic. Brilliance. Everyone saw that movie. And there was a vision in it. And when the visionary created a short film called 9, he realized that his vision was far too big, so he remade it into a feature! So all of this misuse of the word visionary leads me to one assumption:

All directors are visionaries, because without a vision, one cannot be a director.

And please, oh please, do not get me started about the 9-9-09 release. It was cool 10 years ago with the Sega Dreamcast, but releasing a movie called 9 on 9-9-9 is fucking overkill and childish.